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Introduction Roberto Rossellini’s Open City (Roma, città aperta), a low-budget picture about the underground resistance during the Nazi occupation of Rome, opened at the World Theatre in New York on February 25, 1946, and proved a total surprise. Before the war Italian films had never compared favorably with French, German, or British imports and had played mostly in ethnic theaters in immigrant neighborhoods. Open City, the first film to come out of Italy after the war, ran for twenty-one months at the World and broke the previous New York City records set by The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind—an unprecedented achievement for a foreign film. Open City went on to win the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1946 and was named Best Foreign Language Film of the year by the New York Film Critics Circle. After going into general release, Open City reputedly grossed $5 million at the box office and set another record in the United States for a foreign film.1 Rossellini started work on his picture “shortly after American GIs pushed the Germans out,” reported Variety. He shot it under difficult conditions in the streets of the city, inside actual buildings, and in a makeshift studio. Raw film stock was hard to come by, but Rossellini received “strictly unofficial aid” from U.S. Army Signal Corps technicians to complete his film.2 Rossellini chose Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi, both seasoned professionals, to play the leads. To fill out the cast he recruited amateurs, and for extras he used the citizens of Rome. The heroes in Open City are the “little people,” who struggle for liberation. There’s Manfredi, a Communist resistance leader on the run from the Gestapo; Francesco, a friend who operates an underground print shop; Pina, Francesco’s pregnant wife-to-be, a widow with a young son who risks her life by hiding the 3 3 resistance leader in her apartment; and Don Pietro, a simple Catholic priest who “carries money bound in scholarly-looking volumes” and “smuggles ammunition under his priest’s robes” across the lines to aid the cause. Pina was played by Magnani and Don Pietro by Fabrizi. The heroes all fall victim to the Germans. Pina is shot down in the street on her wedding day as she rushes after Francesco, who was caught in a sweep of her tenement and is being hauled off to prison. Manfredi is betrayed by his mistress after a falling out and is arrested by the Gestapo along with Don Pietro. At Gestapo headquarters Manfredi is flayed with a blowtorch and dies without informing on his comrades. Don Pietro, who was forced to witness the ordeal, also defies the Nazis and is placed before the firing squad. Awaiting his execution, he blesses the parish children huddled outside the prison fence, who are whistling a resistance tune to give him comfort. Don Pietro’s last words are, “It is not difficult to die well; it is difficult to live well.” U.S. critics had never before seen a war film quite like this. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times was overwhelmed by its “candid, overpowering realism.” Open City, he said, had the “wind-blown look” of a “straight documentary” that “was inspired by artists whose own emotions had been deeply and recently stirred.” “The feeling that flows most strongly through the film,” he added, “is one of supreme admiration for the people who fight for freedom’s cause.”3 Newsweek described it as “the screen’s most eloquent indictment of Nazism by a people who first aided them, then became virtual slaves of the Germans.”4 James Agee in the Nation doubted that “institutional Christianity and leftism,” as represented by the priest and the Communists, ever coexisted as easily as they do in the film. Nonetheless, he admired the film’s immediacy: “Everything in it had been recently lived through; much of it is straight reenactment on or near the actual spot; its whole spirit is still, scarcely cooled at all, the exalted spirit of the actual experience.”5 Agee wrote off the German characters as “standard villains” but described the acting of most of the Romans—and “especially of a magnificent woman named Anna Magnani”—as “near perfect.”6 Variety also singled out Miss Magnani’s performance: “She is certainly not a heroine in the Hollywood conception , as she is not only homely, but even quite slovenly and rather ordinary.”7 John McCarten in...

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